Odes to Joy – Reflections on Teaching Horace 2


Today’s Feature is brought to us by Teresa Ramsby, Graduate Program Director of the MAT program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
This fall I experienced the rare pleasure of teaching Horace’s Odes.* When I planned the class, I decided to focus carefully on each poem – giving ample time to flesh out all the poetic effects. I renamed the category of “poetic figures” as “word-placement effects,” and introduced the students to enjambment, hyperbaton, chiasmus, synchesis, and word-pictures. Students enjoy word-pictures, and Horace is loaded with them. My students quickly began to look for them without my prompting. One of their favorite passages begins poem 1.9:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus
silvae laborantes geluque
flumina constiterint acuto?

Soracte is a mountain, and it stands tall, covered with snow – and in the stanza, the nive sits over Soracte. Then the woods struggle with their burden of snow – and in the stanza the onus sits on top of the silvae. Then there is flumina – literally trapped between gelu and its adjective acuto. See? Fun!
After teaching word-placement effects, I introduced the students to rhetorical effects – the use of language to get our attention, to set a tone, and to make us understand things not literally written. The students enjoyed looking for anaphora, antithesis, asyndeton, crescendo, litotes, and zeugma. I find that students like sound effects too, and Horace uses lots of consonance and onomatopoeia. A stanza where many things came together – and my students noticed right away – was in 2.10:

Saepius ventis agitatur ingens
pinus et celsae graviore casu
decidunt turres feriuntque summos
fulgura montis.

The large pine shaken is followed by the tall towers falling, and then comes the thunderbolt striking the mountain tops – an excellent crescendo. Note too the juxtaposition (or antithesis) of lofty towers with their “harder fall” right in the middle, and through it all, note the “s,” “k,” “m” and “g” sounds, suggesting blowing winds, crumbling masonry, and the flash of lightning with its murmur of thunder.
Our discussions in class focused minimally on grammar; we talked much more about the meanings of the poems, and the craft of formulating the phrase, the clause, the stanza, the poem. I asked them to look for movement in every poem, too – where does it start, where does it go, and where does it end? The students found something important in every poem. For example, in 1.24 the poem starts in lamentation that a Quintilius has died, but half-way through the poem the focus shifts from the dead man to Vergil (Vergil!) who is mourning his lost friend. Horace suggests the author of the Aeneid is as talented as Orpheus, but has no power over death. Then the poem ends with the reminder that though we cannot change fate, we can learn, through time, to endure what cannot be corrected. The students and I discussed for ten minutes or more about what that means: how someone can spend (or waste) a lifetime trying to change what they think might be changeable, and how that contrasts with understanding that something is final, unalterable, and must simply be accepted. It brought the class to a level of philosophical discourse I frankly have never had in a Latin class, and it made my day, my week.
As we drew toward the end of our Horace readings, I asked the students to select a poem or song-lyric that they felt has something Horatian in it. I had them send me their findings the night before class, so I could put them all on PowerPoint slides. They found great things, such as Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to make much of Time,” Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” and song lyrics too: a love song by Death Cab for Cutie called “Grapevine Fires,” and a rap by Kanye West called “Big Brother.” The student who brought that one called Jay-Z the Maecenas of our age, and he made a convincing argument for it too. Perhaps my favorite was a poem a student found called “the lesson of the moth” by Don Marquis – here are a few lines:

… it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while

Carpe diem indeed.
So here is my message: teach Horace! I believe that close readings of Horace in Latin teach young people not only about Latin, but also about poetry. I would venture to say that of all the Roman poets, Horace comes closest (closer even than Catullus) to the sentiment and expression of the short-form modern poems and song-lyrics that young people today are most likely to know. If you give students the opportunity to savor his Odes, I believe they will.
*This course was made easier by the Horace reader published a decade ago by Gil Lawall et alii. It offers facing vocabulary, helpful (not copious) notes, and parallel passages from other, relevant, Greek and Latin poems. With its aid, students have less work to do, and thus love Horace more: Carpe Diem: a Horace Reader (Prentice Hall, 2006).


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2 thoughts on “Odes to Joy – Reflections on Teaching Horace

  • Ruth Breindel

    Very interesting article, and I love Horace (although my high school students aren’t always so sure about him). I explain this poem also as a Christmas card – the picture through the window of the snow, while there’s a fire inside. Indeed, Horace always reminds me of Alastair Cooke on the very old Masterpiece Theater – sitting by the fire with a glass of wine, a blanket over his legs, remembering his past fondly.

    • Teresa Ramsby

      Thanks Ruth! I’m glad you press ahead with Horace despite your students’ misgivings. I like that “Christmas Card” image – and will use it next time!